Sheona McDonald
A noteworthy producer, director and writer, Sheona has been working in the film industry for fifteen years. She started her company, Dimestore Productions Inc., in Toronto in 2000 and returned home to Vancouver in 2009.

Sheona has always had a passion for documentaries. In 1994, she made her first student short, WITH MY BOOTS ON, the story of author Rosalin MacPhee’s fight against breast cancer. She followed that production with BREAKING THE CYCLE, an examination of domestic violence in the Aboriginal community in Vancouver.

Sheona then began a five-year odyssey independently producing LIFERS: STORIES FROM PRISON, an hour-long documentary about men serving life sentences in Canadian prisons. She also wrote, directed and narrated this project which was acquired and broadcast on CBC Newsworld in 2001. Needing reprieve from such intense subject matter, Sheona spent a year field producing and directing five half-hour documentaries for the series Centre Stage Chronicles, featuring Canadian artists from different cultural backgrounds.

She has also done three short narrative films. RUDE GIRLS AND GREEN BANANAS for On The Fly Festival 1999 and DOCUMENTARY BOOTCAMP for Mocdocs 2002, BOOTCAMP won the Mocdocs award, screened at over twenty festivals internationally and played on CBC Roughcuts and Zed. She directed and co-produced both of these projects and edited DOCUMENTARY BOOTCAMP. She also co-produced and directed GREETINGS, a black comedy about two people who work at a greeting card company.

In 2010, Sheona was one of 16 Canadian filmmakers selected to create a short film for the Olympics. MOMENTUM uses live action and animation to detail the strength of a relationship between a grandfather and his granddaughter from the beginning of her life to the end of his.

Sheona was nominated for a Gemini award for the writing on a documentary she produced, wrote and directed called CAPTURING A SHORT LIFE for CBC Newsworld. This intensely beautiful and cinematic film explores the issue of infant loss, through examining how parents relate to, and remember their babies who are only here for a short period of time.

In 2011 Sheona finished co-producing and writing a television documentary called WHEN DREAMS TAKE FLIGHT that explores the myths, dreams and obsessions of human beings desire to fly like birds, through following the process of a group of students building a human powered ornithopter. It began airing on Documentary Channel in November 2011.

Shortly after WHEN DREAMS TAKE FLIGHT was finished, Sheona started working on INSIDE HER SEX. Originally called INSIDE HER SEX, it examined women as the end users of pornography. However, during the course of research and interviews Sheona realized that there was a deeper and more subtle component to the story and INSIDE HER SEX was born. (3/15)

Inside Her SexA film by Sheona McDonald, 2014, 69 min., ColorWhile we live in a highly sexualized society, the messaging around female sexuality is distorted and rife with shame. What women should look like, who...

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